Get in Zee Choppa!

What struck me most throughout the readings was an essay "An Immigrant Writes" by Arnold Schwarzenegger. It was nice to see a different side of Arnold other than his juiced up action packed self, and honestly i didn't he had it in him. He writes about how the current Immigration Policy is very weak and a new policy needs to be put in place. I agree with Arnold's point of view that we need to not only strengthen our border patrol, but also show compassion for the immigrant. Everyone travels to America or "the land of opportunity" to better their family and lead a successful life. Our past ancestors did it to better the lives of all the current American citizens and it is very Un-American to deny that to any immigrant currently living in the United States. Arnold's piece struck me because he composed a very impressive way to reform the current immigration policy in my opinion. His idea for strengthening the border to prevent possible terrorist disasters but also showing compassion for the immigrant is a very reasonable way to approach such a controversial issue. This article was a very impressive argumentative essay that really helped me understand the formatting that goes into an argumentative essay.

Another piece that really grabbed my attention was the article "In Praise of Tap Water" that was published in the New York Times newspaper. I just never stopped to really understand the difference between tap water and bottled water and honestly after reading this article I praise tap water. This article brought to my attention how much money my family is spending on bottled water every week. The article states "if you choose to get your recommended eight glasses a day from bottled water, you could spend up to $1,400 annually. The same amount of tap water would cost about 49 cents." This blows my mind because not only does my family probably spend more than this amount annually on bottled water, but we have a perfectly good working water filtering dispenser in our refridgerator. Also, I was unaware of the enviromental effects that the plastic bottles had on our beloved planet. That we use 1.5 million barrels of oil annually to make these bottles is a large amount that could be immensly reduced just by drinking tap water. This article also brought up a good point that was a new idea to me "The more the wealthy opt out of drinking tap water, the less political support there will be for investing in maintaining America's public water supply." This could be a very damaging result to avoiding tap water which is why I am fully supporting the tap movement. This essay was such a powerful argumentative one that it completely changed my mind on bottled vs. tap water until further notice.